notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
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A blog about RPGs and settings.

the nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it

Setting: The frozen wastes. The immensity of ice and water and sky. Except when the wind howls and the snow becomes sky and there is no up or down or left or right, just white. Crag and spire and crevasse. Men are too small for this land. Roll d10.

1: Scattered across the snowfield are dozens of perfect soot rings. Within each is an azure imp, a tiny demon the color of glacierbottom. Some dance, some pace, others stare sullenly. None steps from its ring.

2: There’s a subsonic rumble; before the party a crevasse splits the ice like a slit belly. Frozen within the walls are ancient corpses.

3: Under a tilting dirty-white serac is a lean-to made of roughly-stitched reindeer hides with and splintering tusks. Within sits a rioteyed man carving another at the joints. A small cookfire smokes.

Image: Tikgeit

4: Scarlet-blue curtains of auroral light billow across the horizon accompanied by an otherworldly symphony.

5: In the far clarity of distance is a rolling billow of dirty snow rising cloudhigh to the sky, looking to swallow the crystalline sun. The needlewind picks up as the ground becomes sky and pushes all the air out front of it.

6: Crushed in the pack ice is a dhow of archaic design. The masts have been pulled down; remains of small fires surround it.

7: The sky is huge and heavy, titanium white with stars traced by inky webs of blackness. Not looking up becomes almost impossible and looking up impossibly vertiginous.

8: The carcass of a four-tusked woolly gomphothere lies twisted at the bottom of an escarpment. The grainsnow around it is trampled down and hard, and its belly has been slit open, the heap of slick brown guts frozen hard. Huddled within, just as frozen, are a pair of shabby dwarves, tucked inside like obscene offspring.

9: Massed ranks of ice sculptures stand at attention arrayed across the pack ice. Each is flawlessly transparent—without bubble or buffet—and otherwise perfectly lifelike down to the pores.

10: A dogsled slides across the distance. Rather than dogs, it is pulled by thong-shackled goblins in untanned furs; the musher leans insolently against hidewrapped cargo.